Masters of deceit

Jack Engelhard’s classic international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal, which later became a worldwide hit movie, has been republished to meet readers’ demands. His other major works include Compulsive: A Novel, his award-winning post-Holocaust Montreal memoir Escape from Mount Moriah, plus Slot Attendant: A Novel About A Novelist. His website: www.jackengelhard.com

The same reader who put it so well with the lament, “I want my old troubles back,” now asks why I’ve been silent on the behavior of the news media during this Covid-19 crisis.

“To my mind,” she writes from Cincinnati, “you wrote the authoritative book on the media. People who haven’t read it, and I wish they would, need to know what you are thinking. Do you agree, with me, that it has only gotten worse? Please let people know what’s on your mind. I think we are being terribly misled. But why?”

Too true. If there was ever a time when we needed News to be given to us straight, without prejudice, that time is now. But, alas.

If there was ever a time when we needed News to be given to us straight, without prejudice, that time is now. But, alas.Masters of deception, the media are all in this together with their political teammates on the Left, and together this is their world and we’re just renting.

First of all, these are not your father’s journalists. These are not Murrow’s Boys. These are not the men and women who stormed the beaches and knew war and peace from first-hand experience. No Martha Gellhorn or Ernie Pyle in today’s bunch. They were warriors, back then, and they knew the job. Be clear. Be fair. Give the facts. Do no harm. Do not be malicious and do not deceive.

Today it’s about “feelings,” as you can see daily at President Trump’s pandemic news briefings, where, spoiled brats, they ask questions soaked in juvenile petulance.

Their behavior is like recess in the schoolyard.

They went to school. Columbia. NYU. But never the School of Hard Knocks.

Nor did all that begin at The New York Times, when, to his chagrin, Trump in the White House, Editor-in-Chief Dean Baquet urged his staffers to forget objectivity.

Write what you think, he said.

Excuse me, but we do not care what you think. You’ve been wrong about everything, about Trump, about Conservatives, about America, about Israel, and now wrong again about the President’s next stimulus package. This is needed now, desperately. Once again, a particular Party is stalling it from going through. But the media will not name it – because it is the Democrats.

When did we get reporters with no shame?

Rather, it began in the 1960s, when everybody wanted to be a poet, a balladeer for peace, and some found the means through the guitar; others, the typewriter.

Rebellious Flower Children in search of a cause.

It came in the 1970s with Nixon and Watergate, and two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, who showed that through tireless digging, journalists can drive a president out of office.

You too…in other words…can “make the world a better place.”

A generation that worshipped Che Guevara, do-gooders and sob-sisters, stormed the universities and found activist journalism through the Saul Alinsky method…the end justifies the means. In turn, a decade or two later, they became the lecturers, birthing the peanut gallery we have today…intolerant, snippy, petulant, anti-Israel and anti-American.

Nearly everything they produce is singed with malice. They are messengers of grievance. Pied Pipers for Bernie Sanders’ worldview.

It’s all there from NBC’s Chuck Todd trying to coax Joe Biden into saying that Trump “has blood on his hands,” to the 22-year-old uppity “journalist” demanding to know if Trump’s emergency relief plan for Covid-19 covers undocumented migrants as well. That was an accusation, from a roomful of accusations that are embroidered as questions.

They arrive with all the answers aforethought, when, in fact, journalism is by definition supposed to be about questions.

But they have no sense of curiosity. They figure they know it all from the pabulum that was fed to them by their professors.

As they were misled, so are we misled. The answer? Trust your own feelings, your own wisdom, and be suspicious of everything they say, from print to broadcast.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” and the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah,” for which contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com